Sitting in one of my favorite coffee shops talking with a friend and our conversation turns to a school shooting that happened earlier this week. What many would call a heartless tragedy has struck once again. Now I’ve read articles saying that this was the 18th school shooting in 2018 and I’ve read others that have contradicted that statistic, but nevertheless we have had yet another senseless tragedy that has caused pain and sorrow, another tragedy where family and friends are left to re-live memories instead of making new ones.
But the question that comes to mind is…
How did we get to a place where we care so little about the value of life? We have thrown the second greatest commandment (Matthew 22:39) back in the face of God and replaced it with “me first”. We are constantly looking out for number one, endlessly in the pursuit of self-righteousness, and relentlessly justifying wrong-doing. We spit on the cross that Jesus bled on and reject His goodness for anything else we can get in life as long as it doesn’t rub us the wrong way. We have taken the “priceless” tag off of the blueprints of humanity that God gave us and gave it a tag that reads “worthless”. We deem people valuable based on what they can do for us instead of loving people regardless of their actions.
All of this is happening not because of bad parenting or bad government but because we have removed God from our lives. We follow our own broken and diseased hearts over the heart that saved us all. We constantly believe the lie that life would be better without God, that somehow God is messing it up and we are better off without Him. We see all throughout scripture people and nations distancing themselves from God and trying to figure things out on their own, and every single time it ends the same way; pain and suffering, do we think we are any different? Do we honestly think that without the sovereignty of God life would be better? As we have removed God from our lives we have replaced Him with pain, sorrow, loss, confusion, anxiety, anger, and hatred. If we weren’t so blind to the truth we would see that we have done nothing but make things worse. By us trying to fix the problem ourselves we removed what we thought was the problem but in reality the thing we moved was the solution itself.
But there’s good news. The good news is that it’s not too late. It’s not too late to turn back. It’s not too late to start again. We serve an overwhelmingly gracious God who believes not only in second chances but a multitude of chances. A God who is willing and able to forgive us of our many acts of disobedience. A God who gives us new mercies every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23) not so we can live freely without care but to show us how good of a God He truly is. We have a God who heals, restores, forgives, and loves, why wouldn’t we want Him?
So you can blame the guns and you can blame politics but the reality is we only have ourselves to blame. We can blame a godless society and a selfish human race for every ounce of pain we experience. God is right on the other side of the door that we shut, all we have to do is let Him back in. Because when we kicked God out, Satan crept in.
2 Chronicles 7:14
“if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
